Ronald Takaki's A Different Mirror

In chapter fourteen of A Different Mirror by Ronald Takaki, the author elaborates how all nations contributed to political and economic climate during the 20th century. As World War II escalated in Europe and Asia, President Franklin D. Roosevelt made a speech to Congress on January 6, 1941, stating that we support those who struggle to gain human rights and that our nation has the destiny to have people gain freedom everywhere. Eleven months later on December 7, 1941, Japan dropped a bomb on Pearl Harbor. President Roosevelt took the initiative of the Kellog-Briand Act, resulting in the United States entering World War II. This changed the United States relations with Mexicans, Africans, Japanese, Chinese, Jewish, and Native Americans.

This essay is written for the purpose of analyzing Takaki's approach on why we live in such a diverse society and how we came about it. He shares the importance of the making and the history of our country. There are many takes on how this country was formed and I will be reviewing Takaki's approach to this and personally determine if his perspective is fair and just.  America in a New Perspective As a Japanese American, Ronald Takaki was born in America and is a citizen of this country. Did this have an effect on how he portrays the white race in dealing with the issues of minority groups migrating to this country?

In any society, it is inevitable to come across “the terrible tyranny of the majority,” to quote Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Whenever the majority of a society is given power and control over the minority, the result will be injustice. America is not exempt from this standard; as a variety of cultures and races have flowed into the country over the decades, America has become a truly multicultural society, though the minorities of this “salad bowl” population face ongoing mistreatment by their white so-called “superiors.” In essence, living in American society negatively impacts people with distinct cultural backgrounds, from being blatantly discriminated against, to being forced to abandon their culture for the sake of assimilation, to

The US’s treatment of native tribes emphasized their inferiority to white America, denying the founding value of equality. The Declaration of Independence states, “all men are created equal.” Unfortunately, the US did not uphold this value with its relations with

After reading “A Different Mirror” by Ronald Takaki, Chapter 6 of “Chicana and Chicano Art” by Carlos Jackson, and Surveillance by Ashaki M. Jackson, I learned about how collectively minorities face oppression based on their race and how even through all the adversity they faced they still considered themselves to be American although others did not consider them to be. In the beginning of “A Different Mirror”, it describes how the end of WWII sparked a fire for minorities desire to be considered first class citizens such as white americans. Throughout the readings I also learned about how and why many minorities migrated to America. All in all this week's readings really opened my eyes, from the powerful poems in Surveillance to how chicano art has been publicly

Ronald Takaki a renowned pioneer in the field of ethnic studies has over the years authored numerous books on diversity in American society. As a grandson of Japanese immigrants who became the first black studies professor at UCLA, Takaki for many years has continually tried to bridge cultures and ethnic groups in the United States. In his book “A different mirror: A history of multicultural America”, Takaki addresses the idea of multiculturalism in our society, and also talks about how for many years we have been told to acknowledge the notions that the core principles of our nation uprooted only from one group rather than a contribution from other various cultures as well. The ‘master narrative’ posed by Takaki describes the growing

Furthermore, they argue that as an essential part of U.S. national heritage, and due to the fact that a quite large portion of the population either claim to be or are descended from Native American ancestors, a greater effort should be made to prevent the total assimilation of this distinct cultural group with different traditions to European

First, Gravlee explains the cultural perception of race in the United States and how

For generations, many Americans have seen their country as a haven for immigrants, a “melting pot,” of different cultures. These different cultures and traditions brought from countries across the world shaped the modern American identity, some would argue. While it is true many cultures from Europe, Africa, Latin America, etc. have contributed to molding the modern American society, immigration history is marred by resistance. Patterns in immigration throughout American history have created a culture de jour that is at the center for the most ardent opposition. From the Irish, to the Asians, and now Hispanics, it is easy to interchange the culture or race, while keeping the hysteria in any given decade from America’s past.

While the critique of ideologies of American exceptionalism are necessary to reflexively decouple nationalist myth from empirical analysis, the inverse alternative of conceiving of the United States as ontologically racist is also problematic. First, such a conceptualization has difficulty accounting for changes and variations in racial inequality and racial identities. While racial inequality has been an enduring reality throughout U.S. history, which groups suffer from racialized inequality, and the forms such inequality take, vary across time and space in ways that the notion of a singular underlying structure has difficulty grasping. In particular, in the case City College, the racialized status of Jews varied over time. As will be shown

Native Americans flourished in North America, but over time white settlers came and started invading their territory. Native Americans were constantly being thrown and pushed off their land. Sorrowfully this continued as the Americans looked for new opportunities and land in the West. When the whites came to the west, it changed the Native American’s lives forever. The Native Americans had to adapt to the whites, which was difficult for them.

In the essays “A Quilt in a Country” by Anna Quindlen and in “The Immigrant Contribution” by John F. Kennedy, the two authors shared their point of view on America and it’s people. Quindlen viewed America as a mongrel nation because of it’s ever changing disparate parts. Kennedy viewed America as a nation made up of immigrants.     Anna Quindlen’s view Is similar to Kennedy’s by how they both see that America is not like any other nation because we are made up of different ethnic groups. Say you were in Britain you would see brits.

This period was described as [one] whose Constitution is so perfect that no man suggests change and whose fundamental laws as they stand are satisfactory to all..” However, while both Native Americans and European immigrants theoretically experienced similar rights to those of citizens and were granted citizenship/naturalization in the early twentieth century, both groups lived in crude and unsatisfactory conditions in the 19th century; it would be inaccurate to describe their situation as “satisfactory” at all. During the 19th century, Native Americans lived unsatisfactory lives due to forced assimilation and the dissolution of their identities and sovereignty. At the beginning of the 19th century, Native Americans and Americans had gotten into a series of conflicts as a result of American migration to the west, the lands that the Native Americans

The main difference that we see between both racial ethnic groups is that white Americans believed that they could strip Native Americans from their culture and civilize them while “nurture could not improve the nature of blacks” (67). Although some Native Americans did try to live under the laws of white Americans, they were eventually betrayed and forced to leave the

Introduction In Ronald Takaki’s book, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America, Takaki argues that despite the first slave codes emerged in the 1660’s, de facto slavery had already existed and provides evidence to support this claim. While he provides a range of data, these facts can be categorized in three groups: racial, economic, and historical. These groups served as precursors to what eventually led to slavery codes to be enacted and the beginning of one of the darkest chapters in American History. Racial